If ever there was a disciple ideally suited, by interest and temperament, Roosevelt was it. In the long introduction to his opus, Mahan had lamented that conventional historians seldom knew anything about the sea. It was because of this that the “profound determining influence of maritime strength” had been so long overlooked. Roosevelt had no such blind spot. He had been fascinated by ships and the sea since childhood. Two uncles on his mother’s side had been in the Confederate Navy. His uncle Irvine Bulloch was a midshipman on the fabled Alabama, and the accepted family story was that he fired the last gun in the battle with the Kearsarge. James Dunwoodie Bulloch was a Confederate admiral and an exceedingly resourceful Confederate operative in England during the war who arranged the building of the Alabama. In his own travels with his parents, Roosevelt had crossed the Atlantic several times, and on one trip had sailed through the Suez Canal. His first published work, The Naval War of 1812, had been started when he was still an undergraduate. Furthermore, he had acquired a fundamental conviction that life is a struggle and life among nations no less than life among man and beast. He believed in military strength, the military virtues; he deplored pacifists, he said, as he deplored men with “shoulders like champagne bottles.” He was, as every American youngster would come to appreciate, the champion of the strenuous life, the once near-sighted, asthmatic little boy who had willed himself to be the world’s leading proof of “the rugged fighting qualities.”
Roosevelt’s determination to have a canal can be dated from the appearance of The Influence of Sea Power in 1890, which, very interestingly, was the same year the Census Bureau declared there was no longer any land frontier. The Caribbean Sea was the American Mediterranean, wrote Mahan, and like the Mediterranean, it demanded a canal. The canal was the thing to bestir “the aggressive impulse,” and turn the American people from their “peaceful gainsaying” ways. With the isthmian barrier broken, the Caribbean would become not simply a prime commercial crossroads, but a vital military highway. The United States would require Caribbean bases, “which by their natural advantages, susceptibility of defense, and nearness to the central strategic issue [the canal] will enable her fleets to remain as near the scene as any opponents.”
The problem, as Mahan explained it, was that thus far the nation had been too well supplied with its own resources, too complacent in its self-sufficiency.
So the canal, “the central strategic issue,” was to be the great redeeming task. It would shake the country out of its naïveté, release it from myopic concerns. It would breed an international, expansionist spirit. It would breed ships, coaling stations, naval bases, colonies afar. It would create an American navy. “Whether they will or no,” Mahan wrote in the December Atlantic Monthly, “Americans must now begin to look outward.” His head was filled with American armadas steaming to distant and glorious horizons.
Roosevelt was thirty-one years old at the time Mahan’s book appeared and had already made a place for himself among the leading figures in Washington. He would expound on his views at length during evenings at the Cosmos Club, for example, and to the rapt delight (appropriately) of the young English writer Rudyard Kipling, who used to drop in about half-past ten with the express purpose of hearing the expansive young American go on. “I curled up on the seat opposite,” said Kipling, “and listened and wondered, until the universe seemed to be spinning round and Theodore was the spinner.”
In an “entirely confidential” letter written from Washington in 1897, Roosevelt told Mahan that the Nicaragua canal should be built “at once” and, in the same breath, that “we should build a dozen new battleships.” By then, through the influence of Lodge, who had been primed by Mahan, Roosevelt had been made Assistant Secretary of the Navy and had entered upon his duties characteristically, as if accompanied always by a band playing Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever.” He visited shipyards, poked his nose into technical matters, from ordnance to dry docks, went out on maneuvers. From a richly carved desk in the State, War, and Navy Building, with John Paul Jones looking down from a gold frame and a big, glass-cased model of Dewey’s flagship, Olympia, standing within arm’s reach, he mapped global strategy and fired off letter after letter to congressmen and newspaper editors, urging more ships, improved weapons. “Gradually,” he would recall, “a slight change for the better occurred, the writings of Captain Mahan playing no small part therein.” Lodge, Roosevelt’s closest friend and greatest admirer in the Senate, was saying that the canal would make Hawaii a necessity. Senator Morgan declared that Cuba was needed as well, because of its position in relation to the canal. To Roosevelt, Lodge and Morgan were uncommonly “far-sighted,” a favorite accolade of Captain Mahan’s.
Home from the Cuban war a few years later, Roosevelt told a Chicago business club in his rasping falsetto, “We cannot sit huddled within our own borders and avow ourselves merely an assemblage of well-to-do hucksters who care nothing for what happens beyond.” Such a policy would be self-deluding and disastrous. (It might have been Mahan himself speaking.) “. . . if we are to hold our own in the struggle for naval and commercial supremacy, we must build up our power without our borders. We must build the Isthmian canal, and we must grasp the points of vantage which will enable us to have our say in deciding the destiny of the oceans of the east and west.”
A naval base had been established at Cuba. Hawaii had been annexed. Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines had been acquired, and the canal had become an enormously popular cause largely as a result of an incident early in the war, the celebrated “Voyage of the Oregon”
The Oregon, one of the first true battleships, had made Mahan’s and Roosevelt’s case for them about as effectively as anything could have. The ship had been in San Francisco when the Maine blew up in Havana harbor and victory in the Caribbean was said to depend on her. Her orders from Washington were to proceed at once around the Horn. So on the morning of March 19, she had steamed off on a perilous race of 12,000 miles–instead of some 4,000, had there been a Central American canal. For the next two months the whole country waited in mounting suspense. There were long, ominous periods of silence, weeks when the ship was “lost from communication.” Then came rousing dispatches from some point in Peru or Chile. The excitement kept building, every American was caught up in it.*
From Rio north the gleaming white ship was cleared for action and repainted a dull battle gray. Then just over the equator, approximately on a line with the mouth of the Amazon, there occurred an amazing crossing of paths. The Oregon steamed by the tiny sloop Spray, a random speck in the empty sea, upon which, sailing all alone, was Captain Joshua Slocum, of Massachusetts, then on the last leg of the first solitary cruise around the world. “. . . I saw first a mast,” he wrote, “with the Stars and Stripes floating from it, rising astern as if poked up out of the sea, and then rapidly appearing on the horizon, like a citadel, the Oregon/” Signals were exchanged and Slocum learned for the first time that his country was at war.
On May 24, sixty-seven days after leaving San Francisco, the Oregon was spotted off Palm Beach, Florida, and the news was flashed across the country. She had arrived in time to play a part in the Battle of Santiago Bay.
Though the voyage was hailed as “unprecedented in battleship history,” a triumph of American technology and seamanship, it was the implicit lesson of the experience that would matter in the long run. “By that experience,” wrote Mark Sullivan, social historian of the era, “America’s vague ambition for an Isthmian canal became an imperative decision.” As a demonstration of the military importance of the canal, it had been made to order.
Still, of those impelling new reasons for the canal produced by the Spanish war, none counted for so much in Washington as the acquisition of the Philippines. The Philippines, Roosevelt foresaw, would affect America’s future more than any other result of the Spanish war. He was not an imperialist, he insisted. It was inconceivable to him that Americans could ever be viewed as imperialistic. In all the United States he ha
d never met an imperialist, he once said before an audience in Utah. He was personally offended by the charge. Expansion was different; it was growth, it was progress, it was in the American grain. He was striving to lead his generation toward some larger, more noble objective than mere moneymaking. (“For after all,” the revered Mahan wrote, “if the love of mere glory is selfish, it is not quite so low as the love of mere comfort.”)
To each generation was allotted a task, Roosevelt knew. “I wish to see the United States the dominant power on the shores of the Pacific Ocean.”
Roosevelt was governor of New York when he first thrust himself into the actual shaping of policy concerning the canal. The contribution was uninvited and was an extreme aggravation to Secretary of State John Hay. In 1898, the war in Cuba over, McKinley had directed Hay to begin negotiating a new canal treaty with Great Britain, to supplant the old Clayton-Bulwer Treaty, which, after nearly fifty years, still remained a diplomatic stumbling block to any substantive support of a Central American canal by the United States government. Hay and the British ambassador, Sir Julian Pauncefote, had made rapid progress. Tied down with its own unpopular Boer war in South Africa, by now disenchanted with Central America as a “sphere of influence,” the Foreign Office was ready to bow out of a partnership in building the canal, quite willing to sign the task over to the Americans.
According to Hay’s proposal, the United States was to have the right to construct and operate the canal, which, like Suez, was to be “free and open in time of war as in time of peace, to vessels of commerce and of war of all nations, on terms of entire equality. . . .” The United States could keep order along the route with its own police, but there were to be no fortifications. The agreement was signed in Hay’s office on February 5, 1900.
That was the first Hay-Pauncefote Treaty and for a few days John Hay felt he had achieved a milestone. McKinley too spoke elatedly of “the great achievement.” But Hay had chosen to ignore the Senate. No one on the Hill had been shown a draft of the treaty, nor had he bothered to describe its provisions to anyone on the Foreign Relations Committee. “When I sent in the Canal Convention,” he later explained to McKinley, “I felt sure that no one out of a mad house could fail to see that the advantages were all on our side.” The rumblings commenced quickly enough, principally over the concept of a neutralized canal, a subject seldom questioned before. Suez had long since established the precedent of neutrality. The concept was in keeping with the old American policy of freedom of the seas. In addition, there was substantial naval opinion that if the need ever arose, the canal could be quite properly defended from bases at San Juan and Pearl Harbor.
Senator Lodge was the “first to flop,” in Hay’s words. The British had given up nothing, Hay was told; they had simply agreed to let the United States spend the money and do the work. John Tyler Morgan, another “force” on the Foreign Relations Committee and now head of his own Senate canal committee, concurred.
Then from Albany came the most shrill denunciation of all, which, to add to Hay’s exasperation, was played across page one of the New York papers no less than if it had been a major policy pronouncement.
George Smalley, former London correspondent for the New York Tribune, now Washington correspondent for The Times of London, was the one who rushed across Lafayette Square to give Hay first word of Roosevelt’s attack. “You can imagine to what extent the fat is in the fire!” wrote a bemused Henry Adams. “If Hay is beaten on his treaty he will resign; if he doesn’t resign, he will certainly hamstring Teddy. Won’t it be fun?”
For his own part, Hay sent an icy response to Albany, declaring that such matters ought not concern a mere governor.
The mere governor would be heard all the same. “I do not see why we should dig the canal if we are not to fortify it so as to insure its being used for ourselves and against our foes in time of war,” he wrote to Captain Mahan. To Hay he insisted that the treaty was in fact a step backward and “fraught with very great mischief.” He asked the Secretary to consider the case of the Oregon. Had a canal of the kind the treaty guaranteed been in existence in 1898, the Oregon could certainly have reached the Atlantic more quickly; but the advantage would have been far outweighed by the fact that the Spanish fleet would also have been at liberty to use the canal to prey on the Pacific Coast or to go after Dewey in the Philippines.
“If that canal is open to the war ships of an enemy it is a menace to us in time of war; it is an added burden, an additional strategic point to be guarded by our fleet. If fortified by us, it becomes one of the most potent sources of our possible sea strength.”
Roosevelt’s view was the popular one and opposition to the treaty gathered rapidly. In the Senate, Morgan noted that England had once done everything short of war to prevent the canal at Suez, but then took it over after the work was completed. Allegedly this could again be the intent.
To add to Hay’s burdens, meantime, his friend Adams, who had since departed for Paris, lectured by mail that the whole balance of world power rested on the two isthmuses. Suez was settled, but who was to say what the consequences might be if the Kaiser were to make a move for Panama? Five minutes of negotiation in Paris would be enough, said Adams, to guarantee the completion of the French canal.
The Senate refused to ratify the treaty without amendments. Hay was beside himself. Overly sensitive by nature, he was stunned by the attacks on the treaty, taking everything said about it quite personally. It was his first experience with “filthy newspaper abuse.” He was certain he was in the right, and he had assured Pauncefote that the treaty would be acceptable. A career dedicated to the resolution of Anglo-American difficulties appeared to be going up in smoke.
He handed McKinley his resignation, which McKinley calmly refused. “We must bear the atmosphere of the hour,” the President said. “It will pass away.” And like many of McKinley’s instinctive responses, it was the right one.
When the British refused to accept an amended version of the treaty, Hay, to his enormous credit, picked up the pieces and began over again. Negotiations with Pauncefote resumed; this time the Senate was kept apprised. By late summer of 1901, shortly before McKinley left for Buffalo, Hay was able to report that much progress had been made. He had worked on harder than ever, and despite personal tragedy and recurring premonitions of doom. In June his elder son, Del Hay, McKinley’s private secretary, had been killed when he fell from an open window at New Haven, while attending a Yale commencement. “I have hideous forebodings,” Hay wrote Adams. “Good luck has pursued me like my shadow. Now it is gone . . .”
And then had come the shattering news from Buffalo. His world, his career, his usefulness, all had ended, he wrote to Roosevelt. But he also saw Roosevelt as a “young fellow of infinite dash and originality,” as he confided to a friend on the day of McKinley’s death, and when Roosevelt arrived in Washington with the funeral train the night of September 16, Hay was among the first to come forward on the crowded station platform to pay his respects.
Hay was a man who generated lasting affection. The French ambassador, Jules Jusserand, would remember him as “modest withal, never trying to push himself to the front, speaking in subdued tones and scarcely opening his lips when uttering a memorable saying or shrewd humorous remark.” Nearly three-quarters of a century later, over tea, Mrs. Alice Roosevelt Longworth, at the mere mention of his name, would say simply, “Oh, dear little Mr. Hay . . .” He was, as well, many things Theodore Roosevelt was not–fastidious, subtle, self-effacing, a public official who lost sleep over speeches that had been written perfectly in advance. To Roosevelt he was “the most delightful man to talk to I ever met.” His only problem, to Roosevelt’s way of thinking, was a “very ease-loving nature . . . which made him shrink from all that was rough in life.”
But on the station platform that September night, Roosevelt implored Hay to remain as Secretary of State. They stood together only a moment, Roosevelt with his hand on Hay’s arm, both men in black, wearing high si
lk hats, the noise of the station drowning out their words to everyone but themselves. He told Hay that he must stick by him–it was a command, Roosevelt said–and Hay, deeply touched, said he would. So it was Hay after all who put his signature to what was to go down in history as the second Hay-Pauncefote Treaty, the first important treaty of Roosevelt’s Presidency.
This time the clause forbidding fortification had merely been omitted. The United States was to be free to do whatever was necessary to protect the canal “against lawlessness and disorder” and the unwritten understanding was that this in fact authorized fortification. Roosevelt, Lodge, and Morgan were quite satisfied and there was never any serious doubt about the fate of the document after that.
On the morning of November 18, 1901, the portly, white-haired Pauncefote was ushered into Hay’s large office at the south end of the State, War, and Navy Building. No special fuss was made. It was not even generally known that the British ambassador was in the building until he had been with the Secretary for about an hour. Then two elderly Negroes–William Gwin and Edward Savoy, State Department messengers who had attended countless such occasions–were asked in. Gwin held a silver candlestick which contained the taper used to burn the red wax for the seals. Savoy would apply the wax. Hay and Pauncefote signed their names. The seals were fixed. “If there was anything approaching ceremony it was putting out the candle,” observed a reporter. “It is never blown out . . . but must be snuffed out with a silver extinguisher.”
At the White House Theodore Roosevelt declared himself “Delighted!”
III
Like John Hay, the British Foreign Office, Lodge, Captain Mahan, like the editors of virtually every major newspaper, like all but a tiny minority of his countrymen, Theodore Roosevelt had been operating on the assumption that the canal was to be built in Nicaragua. In none of his numerous speeches on the subject, for example, had he ever even used the word “Panama.” (He had either referred to the Nicaragua canal or the isthmian canal, never to a Panama canal.) And like everybody else in Washington, or everyone who understood how things worked there, he looked to Senator John Tyler Morgan as not merely the ultimate authority on the subject but someone with whom cooperation would be mandatory. Only a few weeks after becoming President, Roosevelt had written to Morgan, “You know the high regard I have for you. . . . I particularly wish to see you and consult with you about various matters; and I hope, my dear Senator, you will understand that I desire earnestly to hear from you about every appointment as well as every question of public policy, and that wherever possible I shall pay the utmost heed to your advice.”
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